A Year of Music

I’ll keep this brief, because I don’t want this blog to be about my day job, but Rhapsody America (a joint venture between my employers, Real; MTV Networks, a division of Viacom; and Verizon Wireless, a division of, uh, Verizon) and Yahoo! announced this morning that Yahoo! would be discontinuing its subscription music service and moving its users to Rhapsody. The timing of the announcement is a little weird, coming as it does in the middle of the gigantic foofaraw over Microsoft’s bid for Yahoo!, but I think Rhapsody is the best of the subscription music services (naturally), and I think consolidation of the subscription music space is probably necessary. This article from the LA Times lays out why in a concise and easy to understand way. Subscription music services are a good idea but an incredibly tough one to sell to the public at large.